Appropedia includes coursework content.
There are other wiki sites which develop coursework. The purpose of this policy is to lay out:
- how Appropedia relates to those sites,
- how to avoid duplication
- when content should go here, and when on a different site
Wikibooks and Wikiversity
W has textbooks and W has courses. Unfortunately there is little at this stage that is of relevance to appropriate technology, sustainability, or international development. (Discuss on the talk page.)
Develop on Appropedia, or other sites?
Note that whatever policy is chosen, Appropedia intends to drive the development of material for sustainable education in Wikibooks and Wikiversity. All material developed here is under GFDL and so can be used by other wiki sites.
Possible policies:
- All coursework development could be directed elsewhere. Appropedia would have a portal, or a bunch of resource pages, as a guide to educational resources online (and offline, i.e. books, programs)
- Encourage open wiki development of material at Wikibooks and Wikiversity, but allow more closely monitored development on Appropedia, when desired. Appropedia has an editing community which is focused on these areas of knowledge (sustainability and development), and we have a policy of rigor.
- Allow posting of coursework on Appropedia as an alternative to OpenCourseWare - is this of value? (E.g. if a small institution or course wants to release their material are they likely to find it difficult to do it through OCW?) Or should we look into OCW, and facilitating the sharing of materials?
- Note: OCW may not exist for some members of the academic community. A list of OCW Members is shown, so what about other universities?
- Appropedia could focus on Service Learning, applied and experiential learning. (On the other hand, Wikibooks and Wikiversity don't exclude this kind of material, do they? If not, it's an artificial distinction.)
- Appropedia, focusing on sustainability, appropriate technology, poverty reduction and service learning, can integrate the coursework laid out for students with the site. Coursework can find students editing and creating pages at Appropedia as part of their coursework. E.g. A course teaching about safe drinking water, can include assignments where students edit water-based pages at Appropedia (the instructor checks their user-contributions to assess a grade) and can include a project where students create a project-based page that is reviewed by the instructor. This integrates the site that thier coursework is published on, with their actual coursework.
Advantages of developing coursework here
- Natural integration between coursework and related content, and development of additional content by students as part of their project.
- Working across two or more sites makes things harder to use, (remember what content is where, searching and linking in the right place, checking two sites for discussions and policies as well as content) especially for less web savvy people. Getting people to use one particular site is often hard enough.
- Coursework and other types of content show up together in searches on Appropedia. A particular piece of info on a topic may be in course material, and not in the other content (yet), so this could be useful even for people not looking specifically for coursework.
- This site has a growing community of people who are passionate about sustainability, development etc, and it has loads of content specifically on this issue.
- Our policy on rigor and team of admins and other active contributors with strong science and engineering backgrounds will help content contributors feel more comfortable.
Disadvantages of developing coursework here (and potential solutions)
- Wikibooks and Wikiversity already include these materials, on any topic, in their scope. However we can transwiki the material later (with attribution), or link to here from there, if it's clear that the pages will still be better maintained and developed on Appropedia.
Comments
- Personally, I'm a fan of developing it "here", where here means either the same domain or a subdomain of Appropedia. If within the wiki itself (and I'm fine with that), then I would argue we want a portal for Coursework (seems obvious). By the way, Coursework seems like equivalent to all the other areas (how-to, project, etc), and thus belongs at the same level, which is, I think, Fundamental for now. I can imagine a category:area, but I think that's been discussed without much action. With the expansion of Appropedia toward all things sustainable, I expect Fundamental to begin to get a bit crowded, so we might want to reconsider the Category:Area option. --CurtB 15:59, 22 April 2007 (PDT)
- Portal: definitely.
- Categories: should we have it only in Category:Fundamental, and use See also sections to link between this and the other categories (esp Internet resources and Education)?--Chriswaterguy · talk 20:57, 22 April 2007 (PDT)